This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics ...
More

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in fron of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.
Female Agency and Documentary Strategies focuses on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity.Less

Published in print: 2018-02-01

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in fron of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.
Female Agency and Documentary Strategies focuses on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity.

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. ...
More

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.Less

Gail Vanstone

Published in print: 2018-02-01

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing ...
More

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing several examples of new media art, all of which take others’ social media output as the raw material for art: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s data-visualization site We Feel Fine (2005), Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006–present), and Natalie Bookchin’s Testament (2009–present). All of these projects use social media to think through contemporary relations between the individual and the social or political. And so I end by considering what they might have to tell us about confessional politics as they’re practiced in the age of social media: e.g., Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” meme, the “mattress protests” against campus sexual assault started by Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, and a public forum held at Amherst College during the antiracist Uprising of 2015. All of these protests began as local acts, but then reached the world via the Internet. What happens when confessions like these travel through channels that have made confession so mundane?Less

Coda : Confession in the Age of Aggregation

Christopher Grobe

Published in print: 2017-11-07

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing several examples of new media art, all of which take others’ social media output as the raw material for art: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s data-visualization site We Feel Fine (2005), Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006–present), and Natalie Bookchin’s Testament (2009–present). All of these projects use social media to think through contemporary relations between the individual and the social or political. And so I end by considering what they might have to tell us about confessional politics as they’re practiced in the age of social media: e.g., Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” meme, the “mattress protests” against campus sexual assault started by Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, and a public forum held at Amherst College during the antiracist Uprising of 2015. All of these protests began as local acts, but then reached the world via the Internet. What happens when confessions like these travel through channels that have made confession so mundane?

The chapter is focused primarily on Farrow’s compassionate motivation and how her compassion is embodied in her photographic work whilst it is also, inevitably, compromised by distribution and ...
More

The chapter is focused primarily on Farrow’s compassionate motivation and how her compassion is embodied in her photographic work whilst it is also, inevitably, compromised by distribution and internal content. Farrow’s photographs and videos show a deep compassionate understanding of her subjects. Her work provides a rich context for examining how such compassion and care might be used also to contribute towards a broader discussion of the documentary image as an ethically responsible object.Less

Celebrity/Activist/Photographer: Mia Farrow

Catherine Summerhayes

Published in print: 2018-02-01

The chapter is focused primarily on Farrow’s compassionate motivation and how her compassion is embodied in her photographic work whilst it is also, inevitably, compromised by distribution and internal content. Farrow’s photographs and videos show a deep compassionate understanding of her subjects. Her work provides a rich context for examining how such compassion and care might be used also to contribute towards a broader discussion of the documentary image as an ethically responsible object.

This interview revolves around Vivian Wenli Lin’s use of participatory arts-based methods in order to encourage and teach women in marginalised communities to empower themselves by making documentary ...
More

This interview revolves around Vivian Wenli Lin’s use of participatory arts-based methods in order to encourage and teach women in marginalised communities to empower themselves by making documentary film. Lin also talks about the development of a ‘cine-feminist’ framework which in many ways extend feminist film studies by introducing ‘rare materials of women’s self-representations’. These films thus give way to documentary narratives of overlooked groups of women, and results in a documentary practice that is framed by social politics and activism.Less

Published in print: 2018-02-01

This interview revolves around Vivian Wenli Lin’s use of participatory arts-based methods in order to encourage and teach women in marginalised communities to empower themselves by making documentary film. Lin also talks about the development of a ‘cine-feminist’ framework which in many ways extend feminist film studies by introducing ‘rare materials of women’s self-representations’. These films thus give way to documentary narratives of overlooked groups of women, and results in a documentary practice that is framed by social politics and activism.

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films ...
More

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.Less

From Visceral Style to Discourse of Resistance: Reading Alka Sadat’s Afghan Documentaries on Violence Against Women

Anna Misiak

Published in print: 2018-02-01

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.

Using Profession: Documentarist and its diary-style format as a case study, this essay revolves around the practices, aesthetics and narrative interests of contemporary female documentarists in Iran. ...
More

Using Profession: Documentarist and its diary-style format as a case study, this essay revolves around the practices, aesthetics and narrative interests of contemporary female documentarists in Iran. Exploring the professional barriers involved in documentary film making in the country today, the author discusses female authorship also in relation to the hard censorship laws, the menace of political retaliations as well as gender discrimination. The extent to which these women documentarists are forced to perform their work as a form of underground activism have widespread repercussions on their practice, and merges the personal with the political.Less

Profession: Documentarist: Underground Documentary Making in Iran

Lidia Merás

Published in print: 2018-02-01

Using Profession: Documentarist and its diary-style format as a case study, this essay revolves around the practices, aesthetics and narrative interests of contemporary female documentarists in Iran. Exploring the professional barriers involved in documentary film making in the country today, the author discusses female authorship also in relation to the hard censorship laws, the menace of political retaliations as well as gender discrimination. The extent to which these women documentarists are forced to perform their work as a form of underground activism have widespread repercussions on their practice, and merges the personal with the political.